‘Restructuring types will tell you the market’s just about to take off. It’s all going to hell in a handcart – catastrophe just around the corner,’ says Peter Baldwin, partner and co-head of Ropes & Gray’s special situations practice. Baldwin’s comments, of course, carry more than a hint of irony as hardened insolvency practitioners have been confidently – and wrongly – predicting an explosion of demand for their services since the banking crisis, only to be frustrated by the New Normal of permanently low interest rates.

But while restructuring counsel have cut increasingly forlorn figures in recent years, like Beckett characters forever hoping for the arrival of their Godot – or at least a decent rate rise from Mark Carney – nearly ten years on from the global financial crisis, they wait still.